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Dense, intense, colour. The paralell lines, echoes and extensions of the grid pattern of the streets, 'de-flatten' and twist the island shape of Manhattan and suggest a structure, a building...

This painting began as a 'teaching' painting on last years porthleven course. Some fabulous blues and exciting marks but I never believed in it - why should I? - there was no time for contemplation and thought and the language was not my own. What I did keep was the blue-dot on red which became the palette and starting point in this painting and my Columbus Circle.

detail - Columbus Circle

'Mystery' refers both to the experience of the viewer - what am I looking at?- and to the mystery within the novel that inspired the series*

City of Glass 19 - (Park Avenue) was 'Shortlisted not Hung' in the 2015 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. Nearly!

FRI 21 MARCH

It's been a good week - I have a new painting and City of Glass 6 & 13 have been shortlisted for the Royal academy Summer Exhibition - fingers crossed.

The third tower-shaped painting in the City of glass series. The shift in this piece is that the verticals of the avenues extend beyond Manhattan to the edges of the canvas: the grid of the streets connecting to the grid of the building. I am enjoying the verticality and the subtle rhythms of angles and triangles around the painting but most of all I am enjoying the colour, the new blues and greys and reds. There are intriguing shifts in perception : what am I looking at? The view from the air, the view on the ground, an incredible giant tower, bigger than Manhattan. Is it one image or two? Is the tower transparent , made of glass? Is the image of the island-shape of Manhattan seen through the tower, or is it in front of the tower, or part of the tower, or outlandishly, painted on the tower like a giant mural? I think it is a new kind of space, slightly disorientating...

detail - East River bridges

In spite of the colour, the tower - the new Babel - is oppressive, which is what I want. It has the feel of the sinister tower of the Salvation Army training camp in Camberwell, maybe it is because there are no windows.

For a long while there was no title, which always worries me: it's an indication that I'm unsure what the painting is about. Because of the emphasis on the verticals, towards the end the favourite was 'The Vertical City'. This changed when I put in Washington Square with a fantastic pink made from Fanchon Red by Williamsburg Paint - at one point this small rectangle was the strongest thing in the painting, not just the colour but all the lines firing in. But even this couldn't compete with the long red stripe against the blue, a colour heaven that grips the eyes.

detail- Washington Square

My daughter Faye said it was her favorite painting in the series. She immediately zoomed in on the saturated colours flanking Park Avenue, re-affirming the choice of title. (Park Avenueis, of course, significant to the novel*). Denise was missing a particular blue that had been mainly painted out and wanted it back. I went back in the studio and added some more blues, especially to the bottom canvas, and it's made a big difference. Thank-you girls! Ollie likes the vertical lines carved into the paint.

The soundtrack to this painting was 'Five Leaves Left by Nick Drake. Beautiful.

Stillman enters the cage formed by the grid of the streets where he walks - 'bounded. and on the on the north by 110th Street, on the south by 72nd Street, on the west by Riverside Park, and on the east by Amsterdam Avenue.'*

The cage also refers to Stillman's obsessions, the cage in his head. Perhaps my obsessions too, over two years of my life working on the series.

A couple more tweaks on Tuesday morning - a subtle vertical score down Stillman's back and a blob of blue paint on his left shoulder to lock him more into the painting, with the colour echoed, with a touch of green, in the small square touching Central Park in the top panel. The dot of the Hotel Harmony on Broadway provides a visual link between the two. Formal painting truth - what works in the painting - and context in harmony.

I am very aware of my photo-realist roots, especially when painting the figure - the fallacy of the frozen moment. The introduction of the figure of Stillman has shaken up the series and presented intriguing problems, not least how not to make him giant when placed alongside the street grid of Manhattan. To counter this, I've tried to place him in an ambiguous space, a 'painting space', one that doesn't exist out there, one that asks questions - where is he? He is standing on the tightrope of 72nd St. His 'illusionist' interpretation and position in the painting make you think you know what you are looking at but this is subverted, undermined, by the physicality of the paint and by the strong horizontal of the canvas divide and the subtle verticals that cut through his body. In this piece, the grid is also ambiguous - it's vertical, lifted from the background, an almost-delicate lattice you can put your hand through....the bars of Stillman's cave. At one point in the painting the grid covered him - he was in the cage - but the idea was rejected. It would only work if Stillman faced outwards, staring at the viewer.

This series started with a question: how do you paint New York? I found my way in through the written word* but with this piece, a triptych of three large scale 'architectural' paintings, I think I've found an answer. It's a skyline - the paintings/buildings lie flat against each other but there is also a receding space as the island-shape of Manhattan within them gets smaller from left to right.....

'By wandering aimlessly, all places became equal and it no longer mattered where he was. On his best walks, he was able to feel he was nowhere. And this, finally, was all he ever asked of things: to be nowhere. New York was the nowhere he had built around himself, and he realised that he had no intention of ever leaving it again' The words of author/detective Daniel Quinn" *

That powerful intersection again- Park Avenue and E69thSt, the location of the Stillman apartment.. Grand Central hangs like a pendulum.. My architectural roots to the fore: blueprints, buildings. Central Park is a tower but how tall?

TUES 27 MAY

Exploring blacks again - a rectangle of true/tube black in the bottom left corner ..how to use colour to make it work...thoughts of Richard Diebenkorn's black/orange ' Ocean Park 133' (below) and a black/orange Mark Surridge painting at his recent show at the Millenium Gallery....Manhattan fragmented, open, anonymous, nowhere, subjugated to the painting...

Black is 'nowhere'.....

It's Open Studios again at The Shire hall Gallery- a fabulous space I'm sharing with Janie M McDonald, The dialogue has already begun...Janie's loathing of the salmon pink led to the red found with an Alizarin glaze.... I spent three hours repainting the central green vertical with the difficult aim of getting a line with presence, a line that was straight but not perfect....Denise saw the outline of a figure in the curves of the eastern shore...Quinnn?...Stillman?... the pursuer or the pursued?